Region’s Lobstermen Are Few, but Fortunes Are Many This Season

It’s 6:15 a.m. as lobster skipper Andy Volaski steers his boat cautiously through the fog. A silent squid boat appears as if from nowhere to cross his bow, as Volaski scans his high-tech monitors for safe passage out of the harbor.

The lobster boat Arlene-M’s bridge resembles a television studio control room, with four monitors that display information on radar, ocean depth, longitude, latitude and global positioning.

“In the old days I had trial and error,” said Volaski, 65. “I don’t even look at the compass anymore.” Now that most skippers have electronic sensors, “that took the romance out” of fishing, he said.

Every four days, Volaski runs his 32-foot boat, named for his wife, down the coastline from Oxnard to Malibu to empty the 100 traps he maintains and replace the bait. On and off since the late 1950s, the Ojai resident has made his living trapping lobsters and selling them to distributors and local restaurants.

Along the coast of California, as many as 300 commercial fishermen have permits to trap during the five-month lobster season. In Ventura County, fewer than half a dozen captains make their living fishing for lobsters full time. For the past 10 years, Volaski has been one of those men.

Even longtime county residents are surprised to learn that the waters along California’s coastline yield 600,000 pounds of lobster every year.

“It’s kind of an overlooked resource,” said Kristine Barsky, a senior marine biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game and coauthor of the book “California Lobster Diving.”

“It’s a very popular sport to go out and get them,” she said. “And it’s a wonderful meal.”

More well-known are the prolific East Coast lobster fisheries, which can yield 50 million pounds annually, and other waters around the globe, including Hawaii and the Caribbean, which also measure their harvests in the millions of pounds.

The season for California spiny lobsters--also known as rock lobsters--runs from October through March, and attracts anyone from commercial fishermen to sport divers.

“It’s one of our better fisheries right now,” said Pete Haaker, another senior marine biologist with Fish and Game.

The sun burns off much of the early morning fog as Volaski sails south. His companion Buddy, a 13-month-old yellow Lab, spends most of his time sleeping on the bridge or protecting the ship from gulls.

With well-honed skill, Volaski sidles the Arlene-M next to one of the scores of buoys that mark his traps. Lone crewman Kevin Reynolds, 37, grabs a rope with a gaff and loads the tether into a hydraulic device that hauls the wire trap from its resting place, some 40 to 60 feet below.

Reynolds uses a machete to hack away kelp that tangles the trap like a shroud. His scratched and pockmarked forearms illustrate his past battles with ropes, traps and the pointy, foot-long antennae that lobsters use for defense.

The lobsters smack their tails against their bodies and click their antennae in displeasure at being hauled above the surface for the first time.

Upon close examination, the fan-tailed creatures display remarkable color variations. Their spiky, burgundy-and-brown shells are highlighted by orange-striped legs and yellow, eye shadow-like markings to distract predators near their compound eyes.

“It makes the animal look more intimidating,” Barsky said.

Volaski and Reynolds use a silvery tool to determine how their catch measures up. Under state rules, lobsters must be at least 3 1/4 inches long, from their foreheads to the back of their carapace, where the tail begins. Anything smaller--called “fleas” by trappers--gets a quick trip back to the sea.

“We throw them back and we’ll catch them next year,” Volaski said.

Lobsters can reproduce three or four times before they grow to the minimum size, Haaker said. That helps the population replenish itself.

Traps also must include escape portals, so that smaller lobsters can find their way out.

Lobster traps sometimes unintentionally snare other sea creatures attracted by the smell of the bait. Hermit crabs, multicolored starfish, brittle stars, spider crabs, purple urchins and scorpion fish are all returned to the water.

Reynolds’ job includes dumping the rotted fish from the old bait jars alongside the boat, greatly pleasing the ever-present gulls. With assembly-line precision, Volaski replaces the traps with fresh jars filled with Pacific greenback mackerel cut from 50-pound frozen blocks.

“It has a lot of oil,” Reynolds said of his bait choice. “The scent lasts a long time.”

This is not a lifestyle that everyone would enjoy, he says, but he likes the freedom. “It’s probably the last freedom there is,” Reynolds said. “You work around the weather rather than a time schedule.”

The men toss their bigger catches into an orange plastic basket before relocating them to a water-filled tank at the stern. The empty traps then return to the ocean floor to await their next victims.

The nocturnal crustaceans thrive in the warm waters from Baja California to Point Concepcion. Unlike their Maine cousins, California’s lobsters have no claws, and instead resemble large crayfish.

The number of eggs a female lobster can produce depends on size, health and location, Barsky said. Smaller lobsters can produce 100,000 minuscule offspring each time they mate, while larger ones might have 1 million or more.

For the next six to nine months, the tiny larvae float wherever the ocean takes them.

“They’re trying not to become a meal for somebody. They’re at the mercy of the currents,” Barsky said. After that, the larger lobsters eventually sink to the bottom and find a dark home.

Lobsters will eat pretty much anything they can get their powerful jaws on.

“They’re opportunists, scavengers,” Barsky said. Despite having no claws, Pacific lobsters can eat clams, urchins and various shellfish. “They’ll even eat their brethren if they can get ahold of them,” she said.

About once a year, adult lobsters develop new shells as they grow. Researchers say that lobsters can live from 50 to 100 years, Barsky said. Most lobsters caught off the coast weigh between 1 and 3 pounds, although some as large as 14 pounds have been captured.

Their main predators include humans, sea otters and octopuses.

“If they can escape us, they can live for many, many, many years,” she said.

Fish and Game restricts the number of people allowed to fish for lobsters commercially, and divers can legally catch up to seven each day during the season. Although some trappers initially opposed these limits, many have since embraced the rules that have served to weed out the casual trappers.

“What you’ve created is a fleet of professionals,” said Jim Colomy, local representative for the California Lobster and Trap Fishermen’s Assn., who operates 400 traps himself. “The guys that do it are really more interested” in doing it correctly.